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Huge, huge fan of Brendan's work, "Systems Performance" is one of the few technical books I've read cover to cover twice! That being said I wonder if why he lef

Huge, huge fan of Brendan's work, "Systems Performance" is one of the few technical books I've read cover to cover twice! That being said I wonder if why he left netflix was due to its stock price cratering, the timing does seem suspicious :)

jedberg 4y ago
No he didn't. He announced his departure the day before the stock cratered (some jokingly blamed the drop on his announcement).
- progbits 4y ago
  As a person known for performance work there is no way he wasn't looking at various performance and usage charts and didn't know well ahead of the earnings call that their numbers are not looking good and stock will fall. Not saying the decision was caused by this. But he for sure is the "insider" that "insider trading" talks about.
  - jedberg 4y ago
    As a former insider myself, I can say that it was pretty hard to divine the earnings report from service metrics. We could see over-all patterns of ups or downs, but Wall Street mostly reacts to the future estimations as well as profitability, neither of which we could derive from metrics. And while we had access to active subscriber numbers, again how Wall Street reacted to a miss or not was not always predictable. Or in short, I doubt he could see this coming, especially given that his interview process had to start a few months ago.
time_to_smile 4y ago
> I wonder if why he left netflix was due to its stock price cratering My understanding (backed up by levels.fyi) is that RSUs make up a negligible part of Netflix total comp. The deal I always heard when talking with recruiters there was that base salary was very high ($500k) but they were pretty aggressive about maintaining a churn in their employees. But I never ended up accepting an offer there and it was awhile ago so hopefully some other Netflix employees can confirm whether or not RSUs are a major part of comp today.
- subsubzero 4y ago
  yeah it is curious, I know they used to have a $400-$500k chunk for total comp(every engineer was Sr+) and you picked what % you want towards salary vs. RSU's. This was a few years back so I think they may have gone the route you mentioned which is mostly all cash.
- jedberg 4y ago
  Netflix doesn't do RSUs at all, they do options. You get a comp number, which is all cash. Then you choose, once a year, how much of that cash you want to use to buy options. The option discount changes occasionally, as well as the percent of your salary you can use to buy them. The options are 10 year options. When I was there the option was 20% of the stock price and you could do 100% in stock if you wanted to. So if the stock was $100 a share I'd pay $20 for the option to buy a share at $100 for the next 10 years. In other words, I was break even if the stock went up 20%, and doubled my money if it went up 40%. It was a great program when the stock was growing more than 20% a year. From what I understand most people take all cash now, or nearly all.

jedberg 4y ago

No he didn't. He announced his departure the day before the stock cratered (some jokingly blamed the drop on his announcement).

progbits 4y ago
As a person known for performance work there is no way he wasn't looking at various performance and usage charts and didn't know well ahead of the earnings call that their numbers are not looking good and stock will fall. Not saying the decision was caused by this. But he for sure is the "insider" that "insider trading" talks about.
- jedberg 4y ago
  As a former insider myself, I can say that it was pretty hard to divine the earnings report from service metrics. We could see over-all patterns of ups or downs, but Wall Street mostly reacts to the future estimations as well as profitability, neither of which we could derive from metrics. And while we had access to active subscriber numbers, again how Wall Street reacted to a miss or not was not always predictable. Or in short, I doubt he could see this coming, especially given that his interview process had to start a few months ago.

time_to_smile 4y ago

> I wonder if why he left netflix was due to its stock price cratering My understanding (backed up by levels.fyi) is that RSUs make up a negligible part of Netflix total comp. The deal I always heard when talking with recruiters there was that base salary was very high ($500k) but they were pretty aggressive about maintaining a churn in their employees. But I never ended up accepting an offer there and it was awhile ago so hopefully some other Netflix employees can confirm whether or not RSUs are a major part of comp today.

subsubzero 4y ago
yeah it is curious, I know they used to have a $400-$500k chunk for total comp(every engineer was Sr+) and you picked what % you want towards salary vs. RSU's. This was a few years back so I think they may have gone the route you mentioned which is mostly all cash.
jedberg 4y ago
Netflix doesn't do RSUs at all, they do options. You get a comp number, which is all cash. Then you choose, once a year, how much of that cash you want to use to buy options. The option discount changes occasionally, as well as the percent of your salary you can use to buy them. The options are 10 year options. When I was there the option was 20% of the stock price and you could do 100% in stock if you wanted to. So if the stock was $100 a share I'd pay $20 for the option to buy a share at $100 for the next 10 years. In other words, I was break even if the stock went up 20%, and doubled my money if it went up 40%. It was a great program when the stock was growing more than 20% a year. From what I understand most people take all cash now, or nearly all.